Enhancing Personal Efficiency with Pervasive Services and Wearable Devices

The recent developments in pervasive services offer incredible opportunities to provide a host of efficiency enhancement to human users. In fact, although complex computational tasks still require server side resources, combination of rich content delivering devices, such as smart phones, together with wearable I/O devices and wireless broadband networking, can be used to seamlessly weave a mesh of client side and server side services. In this paper we describe how we leveraged such a set up to design and build a system capable of mitigating the negative effects of stress on the memorization capability of humans. Our system is able to capture user needs and to-dos, to infer where those needs and tasks can be efficiently fulfilled/performed and to provide timely and localized hints about the identified sweet-spots. Furthermore we evaluated innovative ways to drive the user to the most convenient site. We describe our system and a modular design both on the client and on the server sides, illustrating preliminary experiments performed both in laboratory and with real users, and we analyze the results.